On Monday’s broadcast of NewsNation’s “Elizabeth Vargas Reports,” Darin Hoover — whose son, Staff Sgt. Darin Taylor Hoover Jr., was killed during the Kabul airport attack during the withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 reacted to reporting by NewsNation that Pentagon documents show the U.S. knew that ISIS-K members were in a hotel and that an attack was imminent, but failed to strike the group and the Taliban refused a U.S. request to take the group out by stating that it’s “infuriating,” that this kind of information about the multiple chances to prevent the Kabul attack keeps coming out in a piecemeal fashion.
Hoover said, “That’s the frustrating part, we’re finding out all of these different tidbits of information, and it’s coming out in a slow, drip, drip kind of way, and it’s infuriating, frankly, that they actually had three opportunities to take out that bomber or the cell that was working on it, and didn’t take the opportunity to do it. And look, we’ve got 45 injured of our military and, obviously, our 13 that were killed. And it’s just — this kind of stuff can’t continue to happen. Going from war to war to war that we have gone [into], and this is the best that we could do, this is the best that we could come up with? For those failures, wherever that may be — and that’s part of what we’re trying to do and trying to come to — is where those failures happened and why they happened, at whichever level, whether it was on the ground, whether it was in the White House.”
Later, he added, “So, the [thing] that we’re looking for is where the breakdown was, who was in charge, was it the Department of Defense, was it the State Department, was it the White House? We’ve got boots on the ground telling them exactly what’s going on, and it’s being denied, at whatever level it was. You’ve got the two potential targeting[s] of that cell or that bomber. Plus, you’ve got a third one where the bomber was in the sights of that sniper and [the sniper] asked for permission to take him out, and that lieutenant colonel couldn’t give him the information and refused to even get back to him. And if he could have been taken out, why wasn’t he taken out?”
House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX) indicated that there is intelligence about the U.S. knowing when the attack would happen and that ISIS-K was plotting the attack in a hotel, but didn’t launch a strike on it and that the Taliban refused to act on an American request to take out the ISIS-K members.
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
